The Portuguese giant knew selling Enzo Fernández would make it harder to win Europe’s richest prize. But cashing out early is a story the club knows well.
On the night Enzo Fernández left Benfica, nobody mentioned his name. As they gathered in the changing room before their game on the last day of January, his soon-to-be-former teammates would have known roughly what was happening. The club was settling the finer points of Fernández’s $130 million transfer to Chelsea. The player was awaiting permission to fly to London.
The silence, though, was not rooted in discomfort. Fernández’s absence did not weigh especially heavy on Benfica’s squad. They were not fretting about how they would cope without him, or lamenting the loss of a core part of their team and a starlet regarded as one of the finest midfield prospects of his generation.
Their coach, Roger Schmidt, did not feel the need to take his players aside to discuss it with them, or to address it in his pregame talk. The 56-year-old Schmidt has always hewed to the legendary German coach Sepp Herberger’s rather gnomic adage: Der ball ist rund.
Schmidt does not worry about what might lurk behind a silver lining. A crisis is just an opportunity in disguise. One player goes, another takes their place. The ball keeps rolling.
Benfica’s players, of course, are used to it by now. No club has mastered the buy low, sell high dynamics of soccer’s transfer market quite like Benfica. Increasingly, in recent years, it has been held up as a paradigm of how a club outside the opulent halls of the game’s cash-soaked elite ought to be run.
Across the Tagus River from Lisbon at Seixal, the club has built an academy that is the envy of Europe. On the sprawling, modern campus, Benfica has tapped an apparently bottomless seam of prodigies: Renato Sanches, Bernardo Silva, João Cancelo, Rúben Dias and João Félix all trace their rise to their early days at this cradle of greatness.
And what the club cannot grow, it has shown a remarkable aptitude for obtaining. Benfica has established itself as a first port of call in Europe for players emerging from South America, in particular, serving as a showroom and a springboard for the likes of Ángel Di María, David Luiz, Éderson, Darwin Núñez and, of course, Fernández himself.
Each has been plucked from comparative obscurity at competitive prices and later sent on their way to superstardom for a king’s ransom. Since the turn of the century, Benfica has made somewhere in the region of $1.5 billion from player sales. Since 2019 alone, the year it sold not just Félix but also the Mexican striker Raúl Jiménez and the Serbian forward Luka Jovic, it has brought in $575 million.
That is a source of considerable pride inside the club. As a sports team, Benfica cherishes each of those alumni, especially those who started out at Seixal, basking just a little in their reflected glory. As a business, the club has set its target on ranking as “the first club in terms of total revenue outside of the big five leagues,” Benfica’s chief executive, Domingos Soares de Oliveira, said.
All of its achievements, though, are tinged with just a little regret.
“Of course we do not like to do it,” Soares de Oliveira said. “The main purpose of a club is to win. Everything we do is to win, to meet the expectations of our members. If we had kept Dias, Cancelo, Félix, Enzo — we could have an ambition to win anything on an international level.”
It is not that Benfica has not won, either, even as it has transformed itself into European soccer’s most prolific and most profitable trading post. The last decade alone has brought five more Portuguese titles — more than F.C. Porto and Sporting Lisbon, the club’s two greatest domestic rivals — and it has long been a fixture of the group stages of the Champions League. More recently, it has started to make inroads into the knockout phase.
It is just that, if the economics of the game were less brutal, Benfica might have won so much more. This season provides a case in point. With Barcelona, Liverpool and Paris St.-Germain eliminated, there is a freshness to the Champions League for the first time in years.
Benfica, once again, has made the quarterfinals. This time, though, it can see a comparatively clear path to glory. It faces Inter Milan over the next two weeks. Survive that and another Italian side — Napoli or A.C. Milan — will be all that separates Benfica from an eighth European Cup final, its first since 1990.
That prospect would seem significantly closer if Schmidt was still able to call upon Fernández, a player plucked from the Argentine club River Plate for an initial $12 million last summer. Fernández had only made 29 appearances for the Portuguese team when he left for the World Cup in November. He came back from Qatar as one of the most coveted players on the planet.
Benfica did not want to sell him in January. It did not “need” to sell him, either, according to Soares de Oliveira. The money from the sale of Nuñez to Liverpool last summer had bought Benfica some time. “I told Chelsea that,” he said. The club had hoped to hold on to Fernández for another six months, at least.
At that point, though, the “will of the player is relevant,” Soares de Oliveira said. And Fernández wanted the move.
“The Premier League generates so much money,” he said. “The salaries are several times higher. It makes it very difficult to retain a player.” Benfica, he said, has no interest in keeping hold of those who no longer wish to represent the club.
The scale of the deal provided something of a solace, of course. Though Benfica had to pay a considerable fee to River Plate, thanks to a sell-on clause inserted into Fernández’s original contract, it still made something in the region of $70 million in profit in the Chelsea deal. It is yet another feather in the club’s cap. But that is not, really, the metric by which Benfica wants to be judged.
“It is not about trading players or profit,” Soares de Oliveira said. “We would prefer to have the player six months later than have to sell him. But we cannot say no.”
All it can do, instead, is chart a steady course through the churn. Schmidt has tried to be as phlegmatic as he can about the whole thing. He encouraged some players to use Fernández’s departure as a launchpad: The deal came too late in January for Benfica to source a replacement, so someone had to step up and take his place.
So far, that honor has fallen to Chiquinho, a 27-year-old who has spent the last year or so out on loan. He was part of the team that helped Benfica navigate smoothly past Club Bruges in the round of 16 of the Champions League. He will, most likely, be present as it attempts to pick its way past Inter, and into the semifinals, to the foothills of the improbable.
That is how it has to be, at Benfica. The ball keeps rolling. The club is used to players leaving. It tries not to let departures sidetrack them from all that it wants to achieve. But occasionally, Benfica wonders, too, if it might be a little better if it did not have to be this way.
Tariq Panja contributed reporting from London.
Source: Soccer - nytimes.com
